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No need to apologize, I am happy to be corrected. But that still means that if you disengage MCAS, you have a plane that flies out of certification specs (and
by beefield 8y ago
No need to apologize, I am happy to be corrected.
But that still means that if you disengage MCAS, you have a plane that flies out of certification specs (and by extension, out of the training), then?
- VBprogrammer 8y agoAbsolutely. I feel that the motives which led to the situation are quite important though in the greater scheme of things. To phrase it another way, without MCAS the 737 Max didn't meant the requirements of certification and so wouldn't have gone into production. The alternative wasn't to train pilots into how to handle the new stall characteristics. Of course, the region of flight that MCAS was intended to activate in is also a bit of an edge case. Without MCAS we may have seen an aircraft flown into a stall, most likely around a critical phase of flight (landing or a go-around), but that would have involved a pilot ignoring numerous warnings (stick shaker activation, 'stall stall' oral alerts etc) and you'd be better categorised as pilot error than directly related to the handling characteristics. Unfortunately, due to a terrible system design, MCAS appears to be activating in regions of flight outside of the design intent and with greater authority than it should ever have been given.
- mannykannot 8y agoI guess that, for systems that are not considered critical for safety, disabling them if they are failing in a way that creates additional problems is the better option. This calculus depends on how useful they are when working, how much trouble they cause when failing, and how likely they are to fail in that way. In some cases, I imagine the option to disable comes with the requirement to land as soon as safely possible, or to not fly again until fixed.